The Brooklyn Rail

Letters, whether they are Roman, Cyrillic, or Arabic, represented, at one time, a physical thing: a boat, or a hawk, a house, or the sun. But over time these markings, in many alphabets, have become abstracted. Now letters that line a page are mere keystrokes for what they once were. Process is Life, a show of Blythe Bohnen’s work at A.I.R. Gallery, features an early body of her paintings composed of paintbrush markings that weave within grids, rising and falling in expressive undulations with deceptive ease, the eye trying to form those shapes into letters. And even though these are not alphabetic markings steeped in an evolutionary history of culture, Bohnen’s study beside a series of loose square forms in “Brushstroke Series” (ca. 1970) offers a small key into the deep thought that went into each character appearing in the show. In the same way letters are not random shapes, these marks were well thought out. Bohnen was, above all, scientifically attentive to the motions of the world, so these compositions echo with life.

Born in Evanston, Illinois in 1940, Bohnen began her practice as a painter. The works featured in this exhibition represent her earliest experiments, which initiated a career in the aesthetics of gesture. As one of the founders of A.I.R. Gallery, Bohnen first showed these works at her debut solo exhibit at the gallery in 1972; they have not been shown again in the fifty years since then. Throughout her vast array of work, she experimented with gesture and memory. She focused her attention on the wake left by movement: the aesthetic pattern of progress. Asserting the importance of physicality in her work, Bohnen describes her marks in unpublished notes from 1969–1976 as “interesting as cloud patterns, cream swirls in coffee, or raindrop intersections, oil spills.”

To make these labor-intensive works, she would mark the canvas with a brush full of paint. Then, before the paint was fully dry, Bohnen “washed” them in her shower, leaving a series of uneven forms disappearing into and reforming themselves again. Because the metallic, silver monochrome paint has been partially rinsed away, the works in Process is Life have the appearance of prints even though each is a unique painting. Form in Three Brush Strokes (1972), an imposing piece composed of a series of twelve large marks, takes up an entire wall of the gallery. Each character is squat, dancing in a succinct swirl in a rectangular prism, not unlike ancient characters in Mayan hieroglyphs. The fine grooves from the paintbrush stop in the dramatic punctuation of waves crashing on a shore.

Bohnen pays close attention to the space she allots to each mark, the variations of shape becoming visceral as they separate or huddle close to one another. The show illuminates the evolution of these works; each succeeding canvas seems to play upon one before, revealing a developmental progression. The earliest work in the show, Brushstroke Series (ca. 1968) appears to be a continuous action, made before Bohnen began separating the markings. The composition folds in and rolls upon itself in a silver chaos. The first of the series is like the swamp of beginning, before she separated her marks, individualizing them, each in their own space.

Brushstroke Series (ca. 1970), a different work from that with the pencil study of the same name, has narrow shapes that have been so washed they swim ghostlike on the canvas, barely outlined. It’s apparent that Bohnen used a brush to create movement on the outlines here, giving a sense of temporality to the marks. The interior is empty as the exterior exhibits a quickness, while in many of the other pieces, the quickness or slowness of the mark is alluded to through the smoothness or interruption in the interior of the stroke. Here we think of the nature of memory. Perhaps the present moment is lost, but the aftermath picks up traction. In the same way these shapes’ exteriors are marked again, the memories take on new forms and become reactivated in the present moment, made visible by the tendrils of their outline on the canvas.

Nearly one thousand small marks in lines buffered from each other with wide gaps of white make up the canvas Brushstroke Series (ca. 1971). Unable to decipher the markings, the viewer's mind wanders, forming images of fingerprints, small animals, profiles, and shells, remnants of writhing things, all leaving vague impressions of themselves. To look at an unfamiliar letter is to observe a shape and intuit a deep historical significance, even without precise understanding of its meaning. Left as they were, both done, and undone, vaguely remembering the gestures of their making, memories of entirely sensual worlds flow in those compact spaces as Bohnen’s strokes wiggle and waver, turn and dive, reminding us of the lives we create when reading stories from form.